Landlady and Ian are up for an extended period while we repair winter damage. Do you know how heavy stucco wire is, when it’s covered with stucco?
Very heavy indeed.
Ian’s Dome ran into a bit of trouble: We turned the water on two weeks ago, and a couple of days later the cistern was empty. 2400 gallons of water, all dumped in one place, should make itself known in some way but this particular deluge disappeared without trace. Unfortunately there was only one place it could have gone, so we drove the tractor up on all those millions of pounds of dirt we put there just last summer and proceeded to dig it all up again.
Or at least we dug an eight-foot trench over where the water line should have been. And then we dug another next to it. And another. At last, we found the water line.
Hey, do you know how much damage a flexible water pipe does to a backhoe when the bucket tangles with it and pulls it out of the ground? None at all. The pipe, on the other hand, was trashed. To add further injury, while we were standing over the trench and scratching our heads, the tractor chose that moment to run out of fuel so I couldn’t turn it off quick, and then we had to bleed the damned fuel system to get it started again. During which operation the ignition system sort of fell apart, requiring repair before we could repair the fuel system, before we could repair the pipe which was why we were there.
Digging around for a buried water pipe at the bottom of an eight-foot hole surrounded by newly-piled and quite soft dirt is a little nerve-wracking. You know those stories about people being buried alive in new excavations? I believe those stories now.
But tomorrow! Tomorrow we stucco, and all the travails of today will be forgotten. Wiped away by my least favorite thing.
Not a good day by any means!
Nothing quite like having to bleed diesel injectors for one thing but all the rest of it makes for a real sucky day.
Not to mention smelling like diesel all day.
You folks do have your work cut out for you… Hope today is better. 🙂
It rained here, and got warmer yesterday, so I’m no longer snowed in. YAY!
be very careful with the trench – if I asked for a volounteer for me to drop a bag of 20 pounds of soil onto from 8 feet up
I wouldn’t get one
the max slope likely to be stable in that stuff (loose silty sand) is about 30 degrees from the horizontal (1 in 1 and a half), and the bits coming down to say “hi” are likely to be a bit more than than 20 pounds.
If need be, splash out on plenty of new pipe, rather than patching the old
– you can buy pipe – but where are we going to buy another Joel or another Ian?
they’re not made anymore – even the Chinese don’t make them.
Don’t know it this trick would work on the loader, but on my early GM diesel with a mechanical injector pump it works great. I have a 5 gallon air tank(the kind you find in a parts store) fill it to 100psi with a tip that is used for blowing off stuff.
The injector pump should have a return line to the tank. Unhook it and after you crack the injector lines (don’t have to remove them more than a crack) pressurize the return line which should feed fuel through the system. YMMV.
Is it the cold that keeps causing problems with the piping out there?
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